Swiss Review 2/2021

Swiss Review / April 2021 / No.2 24 Speeding up postal voting Using diplomatic bags to send voting papers would give Swiss domiciled abroad a better chance of exercising their political rights, Zurich FDP National Councillor Andri Silber- schmidt has said in a parliamentary motion. Silberschmidt has suggested that voting papers for elections and popular votes could be sent in bundles to the Swiss representa- tions, with local post services then forward- ing the papers individually to voters. In turn, embassies and consulates could collect completed voting papers and transport them back to Switzerland all together. (ER) could erode public faith in e-voting. All systems have loopholes, they argue. The sceptics lobbied in parliament for an e-voting moratorium. They also launched a popular initiative, but abandoned the signature collection process in summer 2020 due to Covid restrictions. There is no such thing as complete security, says Eric Dubuis, informa- tion technology professor at the Berne University of Applied Sciences. “It is like flying: people still board planes in the knowledge that planes can crash.” But after 30 years of research, he adds, individual and universal verification means that e-voting is subject to a high level of security. We can now check whether a vote has been prop- erly recorded, whether all votes are fromeligible voters, whether all valid votes have been counted in the result, etc. “We can now design e-voting sys- tems in such a way that allows us to clearly identify voter fraud.” Ulti- mately, it is up to society to decide whether e-voting has a place in our de- mocracy, he concludes. Politics of voters at cantonal level and nomore than 10 per cent of the electorate at na- tional level. “These limits are a consid- erable blow to cantons that were banking on an extensive rollout,” says Barbara Schüpbach-Guggenbühl, State Chancellor of the canton of Ba- sel-Stadt and chair of the Swiss Con- ference of Cantonal Chancellors. Such cantons include Glarus, Grisons and Basel-Stadt, for example. According to Schüpbach-Guggenbühl, cantonal parliaments are likely to baulk at the significant costs involved in imple- menting e-voting. “We cannot cover these costs on our own,” she says. “Finding solutions to this problem is a matter of urgency. The federal govern- ment needs toworkwith us.” Security concerns are also likely to complicate matters. Motions to this effect are pending in a number of a cantons. We quizzed the canton of Geneva, but the response from Switzerland’s e-voting pioneers was guarded. Ac- cording to its cantonal chancellery, Geneva has no plans to offer e-voting any time soon. The canton of Berne used to rely on Geneva’s old e-voting system and has yet to decide on how to proceed. StefanWyler of the Berne cantonal chancellery said that his can- tonal government would review the situation in the first quarter of 2021. The canton of Berne currently has no contract with Swiss Post, so 2023 is conceivably the earliest it can re- launch e-voting. The Federal Council is reluctant to take the lead, unfortunately, accord- ing to Remo Gysin, president of the Organisation of the Swiss Abroad (OSA). “Cantons shouldn’t have to do it all themselves,” he says. Gysin thinks the federal government should contribute much more, and that in- cludes financially. And it also needs to hurry up. “Ideally, we need to have es- tablished an e-voting system before the next national elections in 2023.” The OSA issued a resolution to this ef- fect back in 2019. Referring to Thurn- herr’s “security over speed” mantra, Gysin is keen to stress that the OSA supports efforts to make e-voting wa- tertight. Nevertheless, ensuring that as many people as possible can exer- cise their political rights matters just as much, in his opinion. Scepticism across the political spectrum A broad alliance of politicians and ex- perts say that potential hacker attacks Barbara Schüpbach-Guggenbühl on the restrictive nature of the e-voting rollout: “A considerable blow.” President of the Organisation of the Swiss Abroad, Remo Gysin “Cantons shouldn’t have to do it all themselves.”